This contemporary private residence designed in 2013 by Studio Arthur Casas is situated in Recife, Brazil.

Description by Studio Arthur Casas
This house is located in a remote beach in Northeastern Brazil. The owners wished to have it built in a small part of their 6.000 square meters plot in order to have enough free space for their children and grandchildren to build their own houses in the future.
This project is the juxtaposition of two simple volumes, with common areas in the ground floor and bedrooms in the first floor. In order to have a better view of the sea the house was lifted 1.20 meters above the plot. Wood was employed in most of the spaces to highlight the atmosphere of casualness proper to a beach house. The structure made of prestressed beams has a large span of 18.5 meters, close to that of some bridges, reinforcing the integration with the horizontality of the landscape. Glass doors completely slide inside the walls to achieve total fusion between interior and exterior. The wooden volume of the first floor houses the bedrooms and is enveloped with folding doors that integrate them with a large terrace oriented towards the beach.
The difficult access, particularly during rainy winters in the region, rendered more complex the building process. Local unskilled labor demanded constant revisions to simplify details. The transport of the prestressed beams and the glass doors imported from Portugal required particular attention to log...